Child Health and Development

teacher and six young students wearing red hats inside a greenhouse looking at plants

To reach their full potential, children need high-quality health care and services—especially in life’s early years. Health promotion, safety, disease prevention, and early identification and treatment during these earliest years lay the foundation for healthy development.

Mounting evidence that health during childhood sets the stage for adult health creates an important ethical, social, and economic imperative to ensure that all children are as healthy as they can be. Healthy children are more likely to become healthy adults. FPG's scientists study many aspects of child health and development—from prenatal health to infant brain development to stress management in adolescents.

Featured FPG News Story

Animal models have provided evidence that the gut microbiome may influence neurodevelopment and behaviors associated with anxiety disorders. Few studies, however, have examined this link in humans. Cathi Propper, her research team at the UNC BEE Lab, and several others at UNC will explore the relationship between the gut microbiome and anxiety in a new study, "The Development of Gut Microbiota and Behavioral Inhibition in Childhood: The Role of Early Stress and Brain Development." Learn more.

Featured Project

The Packaging and Disseminating the JOIN for ME Program in Low-Income Settings project aims to increase acceptability and feasibility for delivery of the JOIN for ME program in low-income communities. A total of 128 children (ages 6-12 years) with BMI > 85th% from low-income families and a primary caregiver will be enrolled to participate in the JOIN for ME program offered through one of four settings using a delayed treatment onset design. Study investigators will evaluate a series of implementation outcomes to examine constructs of reach, acceptability, and feasibility through process measures and multi-informant qualitative interviews.

Featured Resource

Black people and communities are under siege due to the two pandemics—COVID-19 and racism. The coronavirus pandemic has exposed the historical and contemporary inequities that Black families and communities have experienced throughout their life course and their daily lives. This report illustrates how the pandemic is affecting Black families' experiences with racism and discrimination, financial security/material hardship, health and mental health, and early care and education options.

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A Mechanistic Study of the Association Between Poverty and Executive Functions in Early Childhood: Contributions of Early Brain Development and the Early Caregiving Environment

The current study examines the link between poverty and executive functions (cognitive processes that facilitate learning, self-monitoring, and decision making) which are known to undergo rapid developmental change during the first years of life.

American Rescue Plan: Are Families of Color Feeling the Relief?

The purpose of this project is to examine whether receiving direct payments through the American Rescue Plan is particularly beneficial for Black and Latine families—economically and psychologically.

Black Infant and Toddler Equity Project

The purpose of this project as part of the Equity Research Action Coalition is to identify strengths-based programs and policies that support the well-being of Black parents and their infants and toddlers during the pandemic.

Bright Spots: Strengthening the Education-to-Career Continuum in North Carolina

This project will support a cohort of place-based, cross-sector educational collaboratives ("myFutureNC network") across the state to develop model programs that significantly increase the number of students successfully pursuing post-secondary education and entering the workforce. This pilot aligns with the state's goal of having 2 million individuals between the ages of 25 and 44 with a high-quality credential or postsecondary degree by 2030.

Early Life Stress and the Environmental Origins of Disease: A Population-Based Prospective Longitudinal Study of Children in Rural Poverty (ECHO)

This project leverages and builds upon an existing longitudinal cohort to propose hypotheses that investigate the ways in which early life stress alters well-specified developmental processes to adversely affect neurodevelopment in childhood and increase risk for obesity and other health outcomes. It extends our prior data collection both retrospectively and prospectively in order to amplify and enhance our focus on adverse exposures and health and behavior outcomes.

Effects of Feedback Sensitivity and Emotion Regulation on Learning and School Performance in Adolescents From Multiple Countries

This project will examine cross-cultural patterns in feedback sensitivity, emotion regulation, and learning among adolescents. Findings may have practical applications to the classroom and could inform interventions for bolstering students' academic performance.

Effects of Implicit Bias on Children's Early Outcomes

The purpose of this project is to examine the relationship between implicit bias, teacher expectations, teacher–child interactions, and child outcomes. There are disparities in child discipline and development that can manifest early for poor and/or minority children and can have lasting consequences.

Equity Research Action Coalition

The Equity Research Action Coalition will co-construct with practitioners and policymakers actionable research to support the optimal development of Black children prenatally through childhood across the African diaspora using a cultural wealth framework. The coalition will focus on developing a science-based action framework to eradicate the impact of racism and poverty and all its consequences on the lives of Black children, families, and communities, and to ensure optimal health, well-being, school readiness and success, and overall excellence.

Equity-Focused Research Action Coalition and Repository Development

The goal of this project is to support the development of an interdisciplinary, multi-organizational research action coalition to identify anti-racist, culturally-sustaining, and asset-focused factors that ensure that Black children, their families, and communities thrive. Specific to this project is the development of a national repository/clearinghouse that provides up to date information on actionable research, practice, and policy evidence about what matters and works for Black children.

Evaluation of ECIC Child Care Innovation Fund

The purpose of this project is to conduct the year 1 evaluation of the ECIC Child Care Innovation Fund. Guided by a racial equity evaluation framework, the evaluation will determine how this fund influences policy changes to address racial disparities in wages and families' access to affordable, high-quality early care and education. This study will also examine facilitators and barriers to engaging in racial equity systems change.

Family Life Project

The purpose of this project is to understand the early development trajectories in both poor and non-poor young children growing up in rural areas characterized by high poverty. An interdisciplinary team of investigators has been following children from birth with measurement of child, family, and school functioning, observed mother and father sensitivity and language input in the home setting, observed quality of instruction in child care and elementary school, characteristics of the community, and biomarkers of child and maternal stress.

Longitudinal Examination of DNA Methylation in Maltreated Children

We are examining psychiatric and health outcomes in a 5-year follow-up of 200 well-characterized, very high-risk, maltreated and non-maltreated children. This is an ideal study in which to examine patterns of stability and change in the regulation of stress-sensitive genes over time.

National Center on Parent, Family, and Community Engagement

The National Center on Parent, Family, and Community Engagement (NCPFCE) funded by the Administration for Children and Families, Office of Head Start in partnership with the Office of Child Care is one of four National Centers that develop evidence-based best practices for Early Head Start and Head Start programs across the country, as part of a comprehensive Office of Head Start Training and Technical Assistance System. The goal of this project is to support family well-being, effective family and community engagement, and children's school readiness, including transition to kindergarten.

Packaging and Disseminating the JOIN for ME Program in Low-Income Settings

The JOIN for ME program is a pediatric weight management intervention that can be delivered in community settings, with potential for national dissemination. We will package the JOIN for ME program to increase acceptability and feasibility for delivery in low-income communities and test implementation in two novel settings: the housing authority and the patient-centered medical home. The revised JOIN for ME package will be tested in a rigorous implementation study.

Prenatal Arsenic Exposure and Infant Development at 6 Months of Age: The Role of the Gut Microbiota

Exposure to heavy metals in utero, such as arsenic, may have negative effects on health and neurodevelopment of offspring. In North Carolina, arsenic has been found in the drinking water, making this an important public health concern. This study will be the first to examine the way in which arsenic exposure may alter the microbiome of pregnant women and their offspring.

Program on Mindfulness and Self-Compassion for Families

The Frank Porter Graham Program on Mindfulness and Self-Compassion for Families is a suite of programs related to self-compassion in families and schools. Our mission is to bring specialized self-compassion training to teens, pre-teens, children, parents, educators, and all adults who traverse the lives of youth, with the ultimate goal of creating a community embued with greater compassion for ourselves and others.

Rhode Island Asthma Integrated Response Program (RI-AIR)

The RI-Asthma Integrated Response (RI-AIR) Asthma Care Implementation Program (ACIP) is a comprehensive system of identification, screening, and intervention for pediatric asthma. We aim to demonstrate that RI-AIR ACIP is a replicable, evidence-based, and cost-saving model that improves asthma outcomes for children at most risk, and can be disseminated to other urban communities to address asthma disparities.

The Development of Gut Microbiota and Behavioral Inhibition in Childhood: The Role of Early Stress and Brain Development

The current study will be the first to examine the influence of early toxic stress, including the distal effects of living in poverty as well as the proximal factors of negative parenting and household chaos, on the development of gut microbiome diversity and maturity across 15, 24, 26, and 54 months.

The Power of Language: Does the Quality of Preschool Teacher Language Translate Into Children's Executive Functions?

This project will use secondary data analysis of two longitudinal datasets to test if childcare provider language prospectively predicts child executive functions (EFs) directly or indirectly through child language. We will also examine if different ways of measuring preschool teacher language quality are differentially predictive of child language and subsequent EFs.

The Targeted Reading Intervention: Investigating the Efficacy of a Web-Based Early Reading Intervention Professional Development Program for K-1 English Learners

The purpose of this project is to evaluate the effectiveness of an early reading professional development program, the Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI), on young English learners' reading achievement.

Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute

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